There’s been some great podcasting going on at 99% Invisible. The recent Of Mice and Men episode covers the “keyset”, an alternative to the keyboard as an input device. If the keyset wasn’t so difficult to use we could have even greater control of our computer overlords.

Why shouldn’t we take the time learn, if the results are superior? Are we missing out by putting so much emphasis on ease-of-use?

Even Doug Engelbart realized that learning the keyset was difficult. But for Engelbart, ease of use wasn’t the top priority. He wanted the computer inputs to be as powerful possible, and that required some complexity. He imagined that consumers would learn how to use the mouse and keyset slowly over time, like how one learns to operate a car.

You may have caught Doug Engelbert on You Tube in the past. He’s the presenter of the Mother of All Demos. In this pioneering demonstration Engelbert has developed the 2015 computing status-quo, in the year 1968.

My reason to bring this up is that Iâ€™m very interested by how TypeButter accomplishes its kerning: it inserts kern elements with inline style attributes that bear letter-spacing values. Not span elements, kern elements. No, you didnâ€™t miss an HTML5 news bite; there is no kern element, nor am I aware of a plan for one. TypeButter basically invents a specific-purpose element.

First is support for Autosave and background saving. Gone are the horrors of losing hours of editing due to a crash or waiting seemingly endless minutes while a large image is being saved. This change alone is worth upgrading for anyone who uses Photoshop every day.

Interesting read from Quirks Mode, on how the iPad 3’s display will actually hurt the mobile web in particular, by creating a demand for larger downloads to accommodate for the hi-resolution screen.

In order to display properly on the iPad 3, all graphics of both web apps and native apps must be doubled in pixel density, which means their size roughly quadruples. Clever compression will solve part of that problem, but not nearly enough.

The problem is even worse with the mobile web. Jason Grigsby delved into the way Apple itself serves Retina-optimised images to its new iPad site. Essentially, they download the normal images first, and if a check for the iPad 3 is positive it then downloads the optimised images.